Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2012/Candidates/Kww/Questions

Moved comments from #Questions from

 * 1) Could you expound upon "disturbed by Arbcom's ability to miss the point and ignore obvious implications of all issues", with specific emphasis on how it relates to Arbcom's mandate not to make policy?
 * A:Nearly every Arbcom case I've been involved in has wound up with decision that struck me as not addressing the crux of the issue. The one I led with above, for example: an admin blocks another admin and wheel-warred, waving an egregriously wrong interpretation of WP:BLP as a cover. The wheel-warring alone was, at the time, considered grounds for a summary desysop. It was impossible to get Arbcom to even look at that aspect: instead, the discussion focused on attempting to force admins to apply semi-protection to articles that did not require it.
 * The other encounter linked above was actually the outcome of another tragedy: TTN was an editor that was, at worst, overzealous in trying to follow existing policy, and was being overwhelmed by an opposing faction that reverted redirects to restore articles that failed multiple policies, logged out to disruptively edit-war those redirects, sockpuppeted, you name it. E&C2 was a perfect case for Arbcom to come down with a clear and firm ruling that in a situation like that, admins were expected to evaluate such issues in the light of guidelines and policies and come down hard on the editors that were violating them. Instead, TTN was subjected to topic bans and admins took to blocking him, using those topic bans as a justification, even when those bans had not been violated, and applying sanctions greatly in excess of those authorized by the Arbcom ruling. As you can see in the linked discussion, it was made clear that even attempting to get clarification of the boundaries of the ban was considered disruptive enough that Kirill siezed upon the clarification request as a pretext for an attempt at topic banning me.
 * These aren't cases of making policy or not, these are cases of looking at the facts of a case and apparently not even being able to judge what parts of policy apply.
 * Could you explicitly link the first (blp) case you're referring to? NE Ent 21:24, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
 * OK.&mdash;Kww(talk) 21:44, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
 * For context, note that Newyorkbrad had given us a deadline to remove PC from all articles that was about 48 hours in the future from the filing of the case, and that I was one of a group of admins that were proceeding down exactly the same list at nearly exactly the same speed.&mdash;Kww(talk) 21:51, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Moved comments from #Question from User:Casliber
I've written some notes here on arbitration. My question is about the next time the committee gets a complex dispute such as Abortion or Climate Change, where arguments extend to misuse of sources as well as problematic behaviour. Do you see the role as strictly examining problematic behaviour or do you see the need to examine how antagonists are working within our content policies. If you don't see a role of examining how contributors are abiding by our content policies, how do you propose they do get examined? Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:41, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't see how you can evaluate an argument about sources without performing some independent evaluation of the sources. There's a parallel at AFD, where you find contributors claiming that there are multiple independent sources for a topic. It's very difficult to weight an argument like "multiple, independent sources" without doing some evaluation of the sources. In cases like that, I try to extend the benefit of the doubt to the person making the argument, but sometimes you find that the argument is a blatant lie, and needs to be given no weight in evaluating consensus. Similar things happen in arbitration. It's not the role of Arbcom to evaluate sources with an eye towards generating final content, but it certainly is within their remit to do that evaluation in order to weigh arguments and evaluate the credibility of the people in the case. I did a quick review of your notes, and didn't see anything that I have grave disagreement with.&mdash;Kww(talk) 01:16, 19 November 2012 (UTC)


 * I should have done this in the first post - so let's say this is three months' time, you're an arb, and there's one of these cases, and there are complaints by editor A about editor B on source misuse (choices below). Be mindful that asking for Community Review might be a loooooong time in coming. So, which of the following do you examine? --> (a) misrepresenting sources, (b) using synthesis to push a point of view, (c) reliability of sourcing, (d) undue weight? Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:54, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't say that any of those are 100% absolutely unreviewable. You have (perhaps intentionally), ranked them in order of increasing danger. In general, misrepresentation and synthesis are four corner cases. All that needs to be examined are the direct text of the source and the direct text of the edits in question. An analysis tends to be repeatable, and can be objective. Reliability of sourcing can be subtle. Certainly, if I found and editor that was using TMZ.com to support edits in the area of molecular biology, I wouldn't have any problem in using the idea that the source was unreliable in an Arbcom decision. Once you get into biased sources, you can easily get too far into editorial judgement to be on safe ground using it as a portion of an arbcom ruling. Undue weight is even further out of the safe zone: there are certainly cases that are so far out of balance that any editor editing in good faith will reach the same conclusion, but generally, appropriate weighting of material is editorial judgement, and out of Arbcom's remit.&mdash;Kww(talk) 04:12, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Moved comments from #Question from Agent00f
From the remarks here ("consolidation of material"), on the candidate discussion page, and your talk page, you seem to favor a vision for wiki that trims content in the context of strict rules for inclusion (eg. deleting a few 10K sports pages across auto-racing/tennis/equestrian/etc as a start). It shouldn't be difficult to see why such a path could become quite contentious with many if not most all content editors. How do you foresee handling such disputes as a member of ArbCom when they come to pass? It seems dangerous to alienate those who provide wiki's base material ("It's natural that we will lose editors in that process. One man's "problem with retaining editors" is another man's "success at weeding out problematic editors"), so can you describe any general plan as to how to handle those problematic editors who might not agree with such an outlook from someone in a position of authority? Agent00f (talk) 15:00, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
 * We've always had issues with overly-inclusive editors. In some cases, our policies for inclusion were modified/ignored to accommodate them (very few articles about fictional characters or television episodes actually meet WP:V's requirement that they be based on independent sources, for example), and in other cases, such as the Warhammer Wikiproject, the wikiproject finally came into line with expectations. It's no secret that I fall towards the exclusionist end of the inclusionist/exclusionist spectrum. As one member of Arbcom, you should expect that I won't prevail on issues where I fall too far outside the norm. I would, however, act as a counterweight to Jclemens and Casliber, who fall as far outside the norm towards inclusionism as I do towards exclusionism.

This doesn't really answer anything as it was already clear beforehand where you stand on exclusionism. Let's rephrase the question in hopes it will be eventually be addressed: strict exclusion is by its very nature extremely contentious as it creates a direct conflict between the people who write wiki and the people who would ostensibly rule wiki by mass-removing their content. The wiki "norm" is also quite open as evident from its tool design and access rules, so favoring instead a closed curated garden is a dramatic change in direction from everything it stands for, which seems contentious across the board. Assuming you don't figure to fail in these aspirations, do you any plan to the address the upheaval which would result from "success"? Surely those affected by categorical removal policies against their work won't choose to leave quietly. Agent00f (talk) 02:24, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't suffer from the delusion that I will single-handedly accomplish any major changes in our inclusion policies. While I think a shift towards exclusionism is inevitable, there won't be any "upheaval", just a gradual shift.&mdash;Kww(talk) 03:39, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately I apparently suffer the delusion that this is the Q&A page where simple questions would be addressed. Folks are looking for answers as to what to expect since there is already significant dissent/pushback to your existing views from a mere couple out of 10k's of article removals nevermind the desire for much more from a position of greater power. This isn't some theoretical exercise since its practice is evident. It looks like the answers will continue to be fleeting as has been the established pattern. Agent00f (talk) 06:12, 27 November 2012 (UTC)